"Nein," was the prompt reply, and Mr. Tracy continued:
"Where did your mamma live? Was it in Wiesbaden?"
He knew he did not pronounce the word right, and was surprised at the sudden lighting up of the child's eyes as she tried to repeat the name. "Oo-oo-ee," she began, with a tremendous effort, but the W mastered her, and she gave it up with a shake of her head.
"I not say dat oo-oo-ee," she said, and he put the question in another form:
"Where did your mamma die?"
"Tamp House; foze to deff," was the ready answer, and a natural one, too, for she had been taught by Harold that such was the case, and had often gone with him to the house, which was now shunned alike by tramps and boys.
No one picnicked there now, for the place was said to be haunted, and the superstitious ones told each other that on stormy nights, when the wild winds were abroad, lights had been seen in the Tramp House, where a pale-faced woman, with her long, black hair streaming down her back, stood in the door-way, shrieking for help, while the cry of a child mingled with her call. But Harold shared none of these fancies. He was not afraid of the building, and often went there with Jerry, and sitting with her on the table, told her again and again how he had found her mother that wintry morning, and how funny she herself had looked in the old carpet-bag, and so it is not strange that when Mr. Tracy asked her where her mother died, she should answer, "In the Tramp House," although she had acted a pantomime whose reality must have taken place under very different circumstances.
"Of course she died in the Tramp House, and I have nothing with which to reproach myself. I am altogether too morbid on the subject," Frank said, and he had decided that he was a pretty good sort of fellow, after all, when at last Mrs. Crawford came in, and he paid her for Jerry's board.
In some respects he was doing his duty by the child, who, as time went on learned to love him better than any one else except Harold and Mrs. Crawford, whom she called grandma. She always ran to meet him when he came and sometimes when he went away accompanied him down the lane, holding his hand and asking him about Tracy Park and Maude and the crazy man.
This was Harold's designation of Mr. Arthur, and perhaps of all the things at Tracy Park, Jerry was most desirous to see him and his rooms. Harold, who, on one of the rare occasions when Arthur was out to dine, had been sent to the house on an errand, had gone with Jack into these rooms, which he described minutely to his grandmother and Jerry, dwelling longest upon the beautiful picture in the window. "Gretchen, he calls it," he said; and then Jerry, who was listening intently, gave a sudden upward and side-wise turn to her head, just as she had done when Mr. Tracy spoke to her of Wiesbaden.